Catheters are used with stents and balloon inflatable structures to treat conditions such as strictures, stenoses, and narrowing in various parts of the body. Various catheter designs have been developed for the dilatation of stenoses and to deliver and deploy stents at treatment sites within the body.
Stents are typically intraluminally placed by a catheter within a vein, artery, or other tubular shaped body organ for treating conditions such as, for example, occlusions, stenoses, aneurysms, dissection, or weakened, diseased, or abnormally dilated vessel or vessel wall, by expanding the vessel or by reinforcing the vessel wall. Stents can improve angioplasty results by preventing elastic recoil and remodeling of the vessel wall and treating dissections in blood vessel walls caused by balloon angioplasty of coronary arteries.
While conventional stent technology is relatively well developed, stent technologies related to treatment of the region of a vessel bifurcation are still being developed. One challenge related to treatment of a vessel bifurcation involves alignment of the stent relative to the vessel branches of the vessel bifurcation.